ScholarStudio
AI tools for serious academic work
ScholarStudio brings together custom AI tools for reading, writing, feedback, reflection, and academic workflow. You work with your own OpenAI API key, keeping models, usage, and costs under your control.
ScholarStudio is currently in active development. Accounts are available for early exploration.
Tools
ScholarStudio brings together a set of tools designed around core academic practices. Each tool supports a particular way of working: reading closely, writing carefully, thinking collaboratively, and sustaining intellectual projects over time.
MyGPT
MyGPT is a configurable AI work partner for academic work. It supports critique, structuring, revision, and reflection, while keeping prompts, models, and costs visible and under user control. Users can import and export conversations, manage their own chat history, and work with multiple LLM versions within the same conversation.
Feedback Refinery
Feedback Refinery allows users to provide audio comments on documents and then reshape those comments into clear, constructive written feedback. It preserves the nuance, warmth, and personality of spoken response while giving readers the structure and clarity of written commentary. Users report that it encourages larger quantities of better organised feedback than traditional commenting tools.
Guided reading
Structured support for working through complex academic texts. Guided Reading helps users track arguments, clarify concepts, and practise slow, attentive reading rather than relying on summary alone. It guides users in asking increasingly focused questions of texts and in developing more complex prompts for AI, helping them move beyond generic prompting toward purposeful academic critique. In this sense, it also serves as a tool for developing LLM literacies.
Who it’s for
ScholarStudio is not a generic productivity platform retrofitted for academia. Its tools, workflows, and defaults are deliberately chosen to support scholarly reading, writing, analysis, and reflection, drawing from the life experience of actual HE professionals. ScholarStudio is for people who care about thinking carefully, reading attentively, and writing with purpose. It is designed for those who want to use AI as part of serious intellectual work, without surrendering judgment, authorship, or responsibility.
Scholars and teachers
ScholarStudio supports research, supervision, teaching, and writing across disciplines. It is suited to those who work with complex texts, evolving arguments, and long-term projects, and who want tools that respect the rhythms and demands of scholarly work rather than forcing generic productivity workflows onto them.
Students and early researchers
For students and early-career researchers, ScholarStudio offers structured support for learning how to think with AI rather than simply producing outputs. It is particularly useful where guidance is unevenly distributed, and where developing independent scholarly voice matters.
AI-curious, but cautious thinkers
ScholarStudio is for those who are interested in AI but uneasy about how it is often framed and used. If you value rigour, transparency, and accountability, and want to engage with AI without hype or shortcuts, ScholarStudio is designed with you in mind.
Design Philosophy
ScholarStudio is built around a particular view of AI in academic work. AI should support thinking, not replace it. It should help users learn faster, ask better questions, develop knowledge, and work with greater clarity, without surrendering control over their data, tools, or judgment.
AI as a thought partner
ScholarStudio treats AI as a partner for thinking: something to test ideas against, argue with, refine, and use for intellectual pressure. Poor AI use can flatten thought and produce generic text. ScholarStudio is designed for a different kind of use: one that strengthens critique, speeds up learning, and helps users focus on developing knowledge rather than outsourcing judgment.
Grounded in academic practice
ScholarStudio is shaped by over two decades of experience in higher education. Its design reflects familiarity with how academic work is actually done: across fragmented time, under institutional constraints, limited head-space and with actual students and colleagues.
User control by design
ScholarStudio is built around individual control. It uses a bring-your-own-key model, allowing users to manage their own API key, monitor costs, and avoid being locked into a large platform database. The aim is to keep personal data local where possible, avoid storing user queries on a ScholarStudio website, and make the practical trade-offs of AI use visible to the user.
Personalised workflows
ScholarStudio supports different ways of thinking and working. Users can move between tasks, roles, personas, and even LLM models within a single conversation. This makes it possible to work with AI differently as a researcher, teacher, supervisor, writer, coder, or administrator, while keeping the conversation coherent and under user control.
About ScholarStudio
ScholarStudio is a developing ecosystem of AI-supported tools for academic and intellectual work. It has grown out of everyday work in higher education: teaching, supervision, writing, feedback, administration, research, and the practical problem of keeping ideas moving under pressure.
Built from academic practice
ScholarStudio is shaped by the working lives of people in higher education. Its tools are designed around familiar academic tasks: reading difficult texts, giving feedback, drafting arguments, preparing meetings, supervising students, managing knowledge, and returning to projects over time. The focus is not on generic productivity, but on the specific forms of thinking and communication that academic work requires.
A developing ecosystem
ScholarStudio is still growing. New tools are added as needs emerge, existing tools are revised through use, and the workspace is designed to become more flexible over time. It is best understood as an evolving ecosystem rather than a finished platform: a collection of connected tools that can be arranged, adapted, and extended for different kinds of scholarly work.
Built for thoughtful experimentation
ScholarStudio is intended for users who want to explore AI carefully and practically. It encourages experimentation without hiding the work behind automation. Users remain responsible for their questions, judgments, prompts, costs, and outputs. The aim is to make AI use more deliberate, more transparent, and more closely tied to the development of academic knowledge.